Reply #6: Bradley effect "dreamed up...to explain away polling and campaign strategy errors" [View All]

[CreekDog]

In two interviews, one with a respected reporter who covered the Bradley-Deukmejian race in 1982 and another with Deukmejian's own pollster explain clearly why the Bradley effect is a myth and why it is well known within California to be a myth. Read on for key statements from those interviews (hey, i'm saving you time here)

(Deukmejian pollster) V. Lance Tarrance, Jr.: (10-17-08)

He calls the Bradley effect "a pernicious canard," Tarrance speaks with some authority—he was the pollster for Bradley's opponent, George Deukmejian. Tarrance argues the effect was merely a result of bad data: the poll declaring Bradley a prohibitive favorite ignored Deukmejian's advantages among absentee and early voters. To give credence to a Bradley effect in this year's election, Tarrance argues, "is to damage our democracy, no matter who wins."

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1851287, ...


The "Bradley Effect": Myth or Maybe? (10-17-08) (passages from the interview)
(from an interview with Dan Walters, longtime Sacramento political reporter and who covered that campaign)
Prejudice, Polling, and the Election

In California political circles it is well known that the Bradley Effect was dreamed up after the fact to explain away polling and campaign strategy errors.

And the Bradley folks jumped on the theory as a rationalization for the simple fact that they had blown the election by taking victory for granted, stopping campaigning more than a week before Election Day, and being "outhustled" by the Republicans on absentee voters. It was their way of sidestepping recriminations within the Democratic Party for such a narrow loss.

Bradley was so confident that he had won he actually stopped campaigning about ten days before the election. Ahead of the election, Bradley, had a lead of something like 5 or 6 percentage points. The polling that was being done at that time was based on an understandable assumption that all of the votes would be cast on Election Day. Mervin Field, declared—based on exit polling of Election Day voters—that Bradley had won the election. Everyone was crazy with excitement. And Tom Bradley did win that night. But once they counted the absentee ballots, he had lost by about 94,000 votes.

A few years earlier, the legislature had liberalized voting rules, making it much easier to vote absentee, thinking it would help the Democrats. But the Republicans saw this and decided to use it to their advantage. They had lists of people who were gun owners and other conservatives and organized a vote-by-mail turnout campaign to mobilize them to vote against a gun control measure also on the ballot and vote for Deukmejian at the same time, believing that the mailed ballots could be decisive in an otherwise close election.

I would point out that Bradley's fellow Democrat, then-Gov. Jerry Brown, lost a bid for the U.S. Senate that day by about a half-million votes, so Bradley actually did much better than Brown, another indication that there was no appreciable anti-black sentiment working that day. A lot of moderate Democrats and independents voted for Bradley, but did not vote for Brown, shifting to his Republican rival, Pete Wilson.

After the election, Mervin Field promulgated the theory that the pre-election polling was wrong because voters had lied to poll-takers about their intention to vote against a black candidate, even though there was never any statistical evidence, as Tarrance has observed.

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/441/prejudice-campaign.htm ...